AstralP, I hear you. It would appear to me that Yamaha have managed to beat some customer awareness into Steinberg since the takeover but it has yet to seep into the deep crevices of the various VSTi departments. Personally, as a user I despaired of ever seeing HALion 4 and eventually went to Kontakt 4. When it did appear, I was an early adopter and have since upgraded to H5, but also to K5 as there is simply more happening over at NI, and with Kontakt content providers.
I have floated the idea of allowing content to be produced using H5 that can be consumed in HALion Sonic SE (which is now effectively free in all current versions of Cubase). That would be the inverse of the NI proposition, whereby a free player is provided, but the content is paid.
There could be a tiered model whereby content could be available for Cubase Elements, Artist and Pro, and additional paid content could be available to all, but a free library should be available to the “LE” version which would be bundled with hardware; HALion (full) should be able to create content for HSSE so it can be consumed even by the LE customers, thus enticing them to become Cubase users.